Snooping On The Enemy

June 28, 1992

The latest rap against Ross Perot is that he has a nasty penchant to dig up dirt on his enemies -- as if that were an activity foreign to the political establishment.

A spokesman for President Bush reacted strongly to The Washington Post story saying that the Texas billionaire hired snoops to find damaging information on Mr. Bush when he was vice president. If the stories are true, said Bush campaign chairman Robert Teeter, Mr. Perot "doesn't have the judgment or temperament or respect for our laws to be president."

The Bush campaign has spent the past few days trying to paint the all-but-declared independent candidate as a vindictive tyrant who "goes outside the rules that everyone else has to follow." Mr. Perot may deserve that characterization, although it isn't clear from this episode that he does. The public really doesn't know him yet and may want to reserve judgment.

Mr. Perot admits to hiring private investigators to find out whether Mr. Bush was corrupt. He claims not to have broken any laws in ordering the inquiry and nobody says that he did. Apparently Mr. Perot didn't find anything bad about Mr. Bush. The results were given to the Post in 1988, but no articles about them were published. Still, the impulse to dig into a political opponent's private life is disturbing, no matter who does it. Many Americans still shudder at the memories of White House "plumbers' " breaking into a physician's office to get psychiatric records -- an illegal act -- and of a president compiling an enemies list and using federal agencies such as the FBI and the IRS to discredit and harass opponents. But those were instances of advanced political paranoia, and it's too great a leap to suggest that Mr. Perot would abuse governmental power in that way because he hired private investigators as a private citizen. It's a disturbing impulse but not a disqualifying impulse.

Besides, "opposition research" is the rage among mainstream politicians of every stripe. Teams of campaign operatives spend their days sifting through the backgrounds of opponents looking for embarrassing stuff. Republicans admit they're scouring the records of Gov. Bill Clinton and Mr. Perot. Do they want us to believe they wouldn't use hot material? If anything, the revelations about Mr. Perot's interest in snooping makes him look more like a